Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

4 Responses to “Bloomberg Visual Data: Billionaires”

Very funny little article about Buffett’s bet that the Vanguard S&P 500 Fund would outperform the average of five fund of hedge funds selected by Protoge. As of the date of the article, the S&P 500 fund was ahead.

However, the funniest part is that the collateral for the million dollar contribution to the charity of the winner’s choice was put in a 10-yr Treasury zero coupon bond which has outperformed both the S&P500 and the hedge funds to date!

Carlos Slim says he plans to make dramatic changes this year because of Mexico’s high taxes. Ok, just kidding. From a New Yorker profile: http://nyr.kr/VvJJzS

“In modern history, no one has dominated a major economy as overwhelmingly as Carlos Slim does that of Mexico—a country of a hundred and ten million citizens, in which the per-capita income is little more than ten thousand dollars. In August, 2007, Eduardo Porter, a member of the Times editorial board, wrote on the Op-Ed page, “Growing up in Mexico City, I always knew Mexico was an unjust country—a place where small coteries of the privileged control all power and wealth while half the population lives in poverty. But it never occurred to me that Mexico would have billionaires.” Porter was referring to a report in Forbes that listed, among the world’s nine hundred and forty-six billionaires, ten Mexicans, including Slim, and to an article in Fortune that named him the world’s richest man, worth, at the time, fifty-nine billion dollars—equivalent to five per cent of Mexico’s total annual production of goods and services. Comparing Slim to the robber barons of America’s Gilded Age, Porter observed, “It takes about nine of the captains of industry and finance of the 19th and early 20th centuries”—he listed John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John J. Astor, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Stewart, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, Jay Gould, and Marshall Field—“to replicate the footprint that Mr. Slim has left on Mexico.”

It looks like retailing is the best way to become a billionaire, Slim’s father, the Waltons, IKEA, Inditex

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About Barry Ritholtz

Ritholtz has been observing capital markets with a critical eye for 20 years. With a background in math & sciences and a law school degree, he is not your typical Wall St. persona. He left Law for Finance, working as a trader, researcher and strategist before graduating to asset managementRead More...

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